“I’m not trying to make no-one bitter” (Video)

When I moved, I brought a hard drive with all my CDs ripped to it, which never actually got installed anywhere because the type was incompatible with any of Mr. U’s computers. (That was before flash drives were common. It’s still around here somewhere…) The physical disks were lost in a house fire back home in 2006 or so, so I’ve been replacing older music as and when. I’ve stopped being so cheap about that lately, since we are not poor; if something I actually like gets stuck in my head, and stays there long enough, I will usually download the album. (I may not like Amazon, but their mp3 store phone app is just too convenient…) And my own personal mental radio is pretty much always going, like it or not. Earworms ‘R’ Us!

At any rate, two of my fairly recent acquisitions were Suicidal Tendencies’ 1988 How Will I Laugh Tomorrow When I Can’t Even Smile Today (answer to the rhetorical question: you just do) and 1990 Lights…Camera…Revolution!. I’ve been listening to them a lot, not having heard either one in probably 10 years, and almost having forgotten how good they are if you like thoughtful thrash-flavored stuff. These two are the most straightforwardly metal albums ST has turned out, though still with some overtones of punk. I plan to post some more from HWILT pretty soon.

This particular song is nothing like anything else I’ve heard from ST; being, as Mark Prindle described it, “a pop-rock composition played as headbanging metal!” Brilliantly catchy, which ties in very well with the repeated “not just me!”.

It got me thinking again about some of the really harmful assumptions that get made about people on the autistic spectrum, in particular, along with others who live under DSM labels. I’m not suggesting that Mike Muir is autistic, but that is exactly the point: autistic experience is human experience, which a lot of people who ought to know better want to forget or ignore sometimes in the pursuit of widgetry or out of, erm, just plain lack of felt empathy for people they perceive as sufficiently different.

I’ve lived in places that you wouldn’t never ever want to be
Places where for a minute you couldn’t ever stand to be
I’ve seen things, I’ve seen things you’d never want to see
So what gives, what gives you the right to be the judge of me…

If you look in my heart you’d know it
I’m just trying to make my world better
If you look in my heart you’d see it
I got to do it alone #

I wish so hard that I could be just like the one you want me to
But it doesn’t seem to work though I’m trying
I try so hard to do what’s right to be so good to make you proud
But it never seems to satisfy you
It’s just the person that you want is not the person that I am
The conflict inside’s horrifying
I want so much for you to think of me as a person that
deserves your respect and attention

Some very common human themes here, yeah. Yet people who get thrown into certain categories are at a high risk of being hurt or even murdered because of this stuff.